


the sky in all its zones

by omphale23



Category: The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-18
Updated: 2017-12-18
Packaged: 2019-02-16 11:39:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13053267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/omphale23/pseuds/omphale23
Summary: The first sentence of every novel should be: "Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human."--Michael Ondaatje





	the sky in all its zones

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lyryk (s_k)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/s_k/gifts).



_Toronto, 1939_

Later, when Hana remembers the years before Patrick left for war, she is sure it was different somehow, that the mornings were all sunny, the evenings filled with laughter. It isn’t that way at all, but memories are shaded by the future and she remembers blinding snow, the glint of Toronto windows in the glare after a blizzard, but the warmth of Italy in summer follows her home and suddenly her childhood is translated.

Five years waiting and she won’t recognize Patrick when he arrives, grimy from the train and thin, thin like he had been when her mother first brought him home. The depression has not been kind to anyone. He slips back into the old places with only a whisper of welcome, a brief nod of thanks for his sacrifice.

Hana is older, no longer the gap-toothed girl she once was. Hesitant where once she would have embraced him, quiet in the spaces of conversation her mother would once have filled. She is a child still, with her future still buried and behind her only the years of sharing Alice with this man, whose name Hana carries through the streets but cannot own as her birthright.

It is three hundred miles from the gray stone walls of his prison to this warm small apartment where Hana packs her suitcase and settles down to wait. In the years since the trial, she has not been taken to visit. The community that embraced her puts little weight on the importance of propinquity to family, and she is not really his child, even though he has raised her.

_Toronto, 1934_

She sits in the library, submerged in languages alive and dead, searching for a thread to hold history together. It must exist, the world must contain reasons, justifications, some pattern that Hana can learn if only she can find the source.

In the streets, seasons pass and Hana feels time dripping onto her skin, measures it in hemlines and hand me down shoes. The alleys and tenements, once her playgrounds, loom darker each year. Still she searches, still she hesitates.

She is alien, Temelcoff’s small lodger with the convict father and the murdered mother and, earlier still, another father vanished into the wilderness before her birth. She is their own, wrapped in a common language yet held suspended, alone.

_Toronto, 1939_

Patrick doesn’t have stories of his time away, jumps at the bang of trays on counters, sits with his back to the wall. It isn’t until later, when Caravaggio appears at their door, that Hana hears of the daring escape, the disguises, the cause they have both unwittingly joined and embraced as truth.

—Blue? You painted him blue? Like the sky.

—No, like the roof of the warden’s office. Blue like a penitentiary, like penance.  
—Blue like a Renaissance madonna.  
—Yes, like a chapel window.  
—Freedom’s blue.  
—The color of blue that princes once murdered to gain.

Hana imagines it. Perhaps they are lying.

All three are uncertain here in this new existence, leaving space for the missing like a painting gone from a wall, like the space around her mother in the aftermath of an explosion. She works after school in the bakery, bound into her temporary home even when Patrick reappears.

Surrounded by the siblings she will never have, Hana watches and waits for him to grow restless, to leave again. She calls him by his name now, but still speaks to others of her father.

She teaches Patrick to make bread, to knead the rolls and wait for time to finish the work. She brushes water gently over warm dough, tongue between her teeth, to justify her presence. Patrick watches, face somber, secrets behind his eyes. Hana thinks she should be angry at him for abandoning her, but he was never going to stay forever.

_Toronto, 1940_

Cato is no more than a myth, a story told before sleep, a hero lost too soon. Hana cannot live up to him and Patrick wouldn’t try. A suitcase hides beneath her bed, but it has been years since Hana has opened it and she will leave it behind when she goes to war.

The photographs it carries have begun to fade, wrinkled with handling and filled with strangers who stare into the camera, unsmiling. Hana can faintly remember nights spent studying them, trying to decipher the lost moments they define. The labels were never in English, could have been names, places, arguments lost and won. She once found Alice bent over a pile of brittle pages, knuckles white on the table edge. When Hana reached out, her mother stared through her, unseeing, wandering the past.

—Did you love him? My father?  
—Who? Yes, I loved them. And Clara.  
—Will you tell me?  
—Someday, if I can. If you still want to know.

Hana has never known her father, buried beneath ice in a place she will not visit, cannot recall. She has only known her mother, and the stories, and then Patrick.

This is enough, but then she has never known anything else.

_Little Current, 1942_

Clara signs the papers to allow Hana to enlist, unquestioned in her authority, face bored as the recruiter looks between them, offering no excuses. Hana shuffles her feet, but they have had this argument already.

—I promise to write. Every week.  
—You won’t. It’s okay, I won’t wait for news.  
—No, I will.  
—Just come home. Come back.  
—I can’t promise that.  
—Then don’t promise.

She will follow Patrick, and Clara will be left behind. Hana tells herself that no one is truly happy, and carries her new suitcase onto the train.

Clara does not watch her go.

Hana does not write.

_Manitoulin, 1947_

Five years gone, five years yet to come, Clara is a changeling, the past hidden behind her smiles, in sentences trailing off, in letters torn up and scattered to the winds decades before. Hana finds a picture in the suitcase, the three of them, Patrick smiling between the two women, Alice and Clara looking only at each other.

It is another question Hana refuses to ask. She is afraid of the answer. She has learned to fear her own voice.

And so she returns, ten years older or maybe eight, a lifetime between one continent and the next, a war that has ended and will never end. Hana returns to the small brown house on the edge of a bluff, stiff pines on the edge of the lake like a decision not yet reached.

Clara is there, quiet, still, the sun around which they all revolved, untouched even by this new loss. Nothing has ever broken her, not after the first, the loss of Alice. Even without being told, Clara knew when that light went out. Hana contemplates asking how, but turns aside.

_Toronto, 1932_

She was too young to hear the story at first, told only that her mother was gone, vanished into the ether with her secrets untold. It was years later when Patrick offered more, sentences halting as he described rescue, reinvention, remorse.

Mistakes made, and Hana learns slowly that forgiveness is a gift, that circumstance swallows intent, that all heroes are flawed. She lies awake, dreams of blood on pavement, wakes to find Patrick outside her door, silent, waiting.

Maybe her past is a fairy tale. Perhaps she is cursed, destined to be left behind, trapped in the words she can’t say.

_Italy, 1945_

Even here she is pulled along, towed in the wake of lives lost and saved, tugged from place to place before she speaks the names of the towns, imbibes the shape of the streets. Places she has traveled in books are diminished but yet familiar.

She learns to pick her way through rubble the way she once hopped between stones, casual in the air, tense as she balanced on the edges of icy pools and frost-rimed waterfalls. She learned to breathe deep before taking a step, ready for it to be shocked out of her with an echoing splash at a wrong move. Twisting and dragging herself against gravity, always aware that a misstep could be fatal. Patrick taught her the perils of winter, the patterns of fissures and the hollow thud of rotten ice.

Alice taught her that fatal mistakes are a bridge. That strings tie the past to the future, that death is a comma, a pause, a breath.

These streets with their constant threat of explosion are little different. Hana wants to explain it to Kip, murmurs in the night.

—My father told me life is casual, perfect, broken. Patrick searched and found us all, but kept nothing for himself.  
—He kept everything.  
—They’re the same. Bookends, mirrors. Meaningless except in the echoes they cast on each other.  
—I never know if you’re being wise or strange. What are you right now, do you know?

She wants him to see that she is hollow and lit like a shell, but history intervenes and she never finds the words.

_Manitoulin, 1947_

Hana writes letters to Patrick, tears them up, writes to Kip instead. She doesn’t apologize, knows she has nothing to offer as excuse, never gets a response. She was broken before they met, lost inside her own endless chain of loss, no more than the spaces where her family had been. As the Englishman died, whispering words in a foreign tongue, she built up new walls, higher and stronger and hidden beneath her smiles.

Caravaggio vanishes into the detritus of war, shrugs himself out of her life again. In Halifax, crossing the street, Hana glimpses him in a doorway but when he turns a stranger wears his gestures. Hana lowers her hand and waits by herself for the train. She hears rumors that he finally makes his way back home to Gianetta, but it is too late, Hana is already gone. She leaves nothing behind.

In the months they orbited each other and the Englishman, Hana never heard him speak of his wife. Caught in a bubble, the world outside a blur, it seemed unimportant. Returned to Toronto, perhaps he found himself again. Perhaps, like Hana, he never can, not really. Perhaps he has left himself behind.

_North Africa, 1943_

Patrick didn’t ask Hana her opinion of his enlistment. She isn’t certain of her own mind, might have argued against it. Might, like Clara, have lifted one shoulder and looked out the window, unwilling to admit that his departure would be an absence.

Always before he has come home, weeks, months, years later, but home. Hana has held to him as a lodestone, used him to define her kinship with the world. She has waited in dark bars for him to arrive, his shoulders damp with lake water and smelling of gunpowder, and she has waited by the window of rented rooms, staring out into the night as the hours pass. He has always come home.

She does not know what to believe if he does not.

_Manitoulin, 1948_

The Englishman’s book lies in the suitcase, reclaimed from Clara and returned to its place beneath the bed. Hana hasn’t opened it, but at night she runs her fingers over the cover, contemplates her own story.

Her letters to Kip fell into a void, never returned, perhaps unread. Hana tells herself to understand. She cannot picture him, now, and her memory will fade into sepia and fractured ideals. Hana has never wished herself different. Even now, a fragment of a torn page, she mourns but looks forward.

She waits, quiet, for her life to begin again. It will. It must.

In the mornings she pours a cup of coffee, adds cream, remembers the sticky sweet taste of condensed milk as it mixes gently. She carries the book down to the shore, curls up with her back against the prickle of blueberry bushes and her feet in the water, balanced precariously on a slab of granite the size of a table. Her hair, shoulder length, blows loose in the breeze as the sun slants over the bay.


End file.
